I wrote a paper on the beginnings of LDP hegemony a little over a year ago. Basically, the conservatives (as ultimately manifested by the LDP) in Japan co-opted the farm vote in the rural regions of the country, gaining themselves the most solid-voting block in the country. They did this through the manipulation of rural political campaigns, which in Japan were dominated by elites in rural Japan.

For example, despite the fact that rural and semi-rural voters consistently had the highest voting rates during the period from 1947-1958, rural citizens were on average less informed and less politically conscious than urban voters. It seems that “the higher voting rate is reflective of a higher degree of discipline and social pressure,” and that rural citizens are made to feel that “voting is a duty, not a right.” It is precisely this attitude that accounts for the high voting rate among rural voters despite their relative lack of political knowledge.

So now the question becomes: how did the conservative parties win over the rural elites?

Simple answer: pork spending and the Nokyo (Agricultural Cooperatives).

During the pre-war period, vote gathering was carried out by landlords who thus used this process as a way to influence the politicians. With land reform (initiated by SCAP) came the virtual destruction of landlord power and the politicians had to rely on other elites to perform this all-important electoral function. Into this void stepped local officials, including “mayors, assemblymen, heads of Agricultural Cooperatives, and so on.” It was the local politicians, who in the post-war period came to be the most important vote gatherers for the national-level candidates. However, local politicians were not the only elites with vote gathering power. Other campaign elites included leaders of Agricultural Cooperatives, presidents of important organizations, and “men of high social standing such as dentists and doctors.”

The Nokyo or Agricultural Cooperatives began operating in 1948. By 1958, 99.5% of Japanese farming families were members of the Agricultural Cooperatives, of which the smallest units were “neighborhood associations” of between five and twenty households. Although the Nokyo were mainly economic and social organizations, with almost universal famer membership, they played an essential political role in Japan. By the late 1950s, the Agricultural Cooperatives had become closely associated with the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. In addition, the majority of Nokyo leaders supported the LDP to such a degree that they were frequently referred to as the Party’s “standing organizers.”

Agricultural Cooperative leaders were singularly well-placed, as heads of organizations that included almost the entirety of farming households as members, to use their personal connections to get out the vote in favor of politicians they supported. By the late 1950s, most of the Nokyo leaders were firmly rooted to the LDP; the process of winning them over was already complete. We must look back earlier, however, to the period of 1948-1955 to see how the LDP’s conservative predecessors turned the Agricultural Cooperative chiefs to their side.

In 1949, the conservative Liberal Party came to power. Its politicians used their institutional position in government and the resources thus made available to them to buy off and restructure the Agricultural Cooperatives. This process started in 1949 when the harsh austerity measures of the “Dodge Line” forced many Nokyo to the brink of bankruptcy. The Liberal Party then came to the rescue with a package of “loans and subsidies as part of a reorganization” of the Cooperatives. The reorganization then placed the Nokyo “more firmly under [the] control [of] and dependence” on the Liberal Party in government.

In 1951, the Diet then passed the Law for the Reconstruction of Agricultural Finances, which “strengthened central auditing and control of the Cooperative system, which allowed the conservative minority at the center to impose more control, especially on Agricultural Cooperatives sympathetic to the left.” In this way, the Liberal Party “both undermined the Cooperatives and then acted as their savior with an infusion of cash, thereby turning political loyalties towards the right by extending central control.” The Liberal Party used its institutional position as the Party in government to overwhelm the Nokyo and remold them and their leaders to become electioneering tools of the Party, much the same way the Party obtained the loyalties of the local officials in the countryside, who were bought off with pork spending.

The Liberal Party obtained the loyalty of the local politicians by creating amongst them a dependency on the distribution of pork-barrel spending by the national government. The Party simultaneously made use of subsidies, loans, and legislation to reform the Agricultural Cooperatives to ensure leaders more receptive to the conservative cause, which given rural Japan's elite-centric electioneering model, was essential to success. Thus was the key rural constituency won over for the Liberal Party and the stage set for its successor, the LDP, to dominate Japanese politics for the next forty years.

Works Cited

Babb, James . "Making Farmers Conservative: Japanese Farmers, Land Reform, and Socialism." Social Science Japan Journal 8.2 (2005): 175-195. Print.

Curtis, Gerald L. Election campaigning, Japanese style. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Print.

Ishida, Takeshi. Japanese society. [1st ed. New York: Random House, 1971. Print.

Kataoka, Tetsuya. Creating single-party democracy: Japan's postwar political system. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1992. Print.

Scalapino, Robert A., and Junnosuke Masumi. Parties and politics in contemporary Japan. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1962. Print.